Your audience?

This is sparked by a conversation I had earlier.

What are we most of us afraid of? Looking stupid.

This is especially true when writing something and looking to publish it, to put it out there in front of public eyes.

At least I was.

In reality, unless you are a public figure already, no one cares what you have to say…yet.

This relationship with an ‘audience’ only gets built through consistent touch-points and output.

We all hold back in search of perfection, that no one could critique our article or writing. Again, the reality? Almost no one cares what you have to say yet. Prove you deserve it. Interact with them, ask questions, demonstrate a willingness to learn, question, have an opinion. Give them as many opportunities as possible to interact with your thoughts.

People don’t expect ‘perfection, and any less than that I will lose respect for you’. If they do…avoid them anyway.

With time, what we publish can spark conversation and debate. It can be a tool, but this doesn’t often happen overnight.

You have to write something really shitty to have people dogpile on you, whereas the upsides of publishing are limitless. People reach out to you, new connections happen, educational resources get shared with you, companies want to talk with you.

Over time you can build up a pile of assets. Resources to point people to; to help them and answer questions, to spark debate or simply to show you care about a particular topic and you spent time thinking & writing about it.

It builds your credibility and helps you develop. Writing allows you to be in 1000 places at once. Your personality scales.

It's great to have some documentation of past opinions & reasonings and how your thinking has developed since then.

But you have to start somewhere. So start at word 1 and get publishing. Build an audience over time, build credibility one word at a time.